Last Updated on October 12, 2009 4:22 pm by admin
LOS ANGELES (AP) -Baseball fans in Los Angeles and New York may be thrilled their teams swept into the league championship series – but for broadcaster TBS, the fun may be over all too soon.
Three-nothing sweeps by the Dodgers, Angels and Yankees in best-of-five division series trimmed the number of playoff games that Time Warner Inc.’s TBS could sell to advertisers.
At most, if the Philadelphia Phillies and Colorado Rockies needed a fifth game in their series, TBS would have 14 division series games to show, instead of a possible 20.
David Levy, president of sales, distribution and sports for Turner Broadcasting System, said the broadcaster still hit its revenue projections for this round of the baseball playoffs – but will miss out on the chance to pad the profits.
The network partially made up for the quick-ending series by selling ad spots for an unexpected season-ending tiebreaker between Detroit and Minnesota on Oct. 6. And Game 2 of the Yankees-Twins series went into extra innings, enabling TBS to air more ads.
The games drew an average of 4.7 million viewers, up 10 percent from the same round of the playoffs last year. Advertisers didn’t pay more for a bigger-than-expected audience, so they got more bang for their bucks.
TBS is set to broadcast the National League Championship Series between the Dodgers and the winner of the Phillies-Rockies series starting Thursday. Fox, a News Corp. division, broadcasts the American League Championship Series between the Yankees and Angels starting Friday.
As part of a multiyear deal, TBS broadcasts all the division series and one championship series, while Fox broadcasts the other championship series and the World Series.